


say a hail mary

by Ryah_Ignis



Series: Season 11 Codas [8]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: 11x23 coda, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-13
Updated: 2016-08-13
Packaged: 2018-08-08 13:41:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7759996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ryah_Ignis/pseuds/Ryah_Ignis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Tell me something only you would know.”</p><p>“You made an apple pie once when you were absolutely exhausted because Sam was crying all night—kid was always colicky—and you put cumin in instead of cinnamon.  You didn’t tell Dad, so he ate it all without complaining because he didn’t want to insult your baking.”</p><p>“Dean?”</p><p>Mary is back.  It's complicated.</p>
            </blockquote>





	say a hail mary

Mary’s first instinct is to improvise a weapon and chuck her shoe at him.

The second, upon realizing that she’s barefoot, is to run. She takes off, zig-zagging in case he has a gun, her blood roaring in her ears. Every few seconds, fire flashes in her mind—memory?—and almost blinds her. All she can think about is getting back to her boys because—something. November 2nd, never mind that it’s too warm for November in Kansas, means her deal is due. She has to get home, has to tell John everything, has to salt the windows, the doors, has to—

She hits the ground hard, skidding a few feet before she has the chance to pick herself back up again. She does a quick inventory—two skinned knees, both palms bloody, one ankle twisted—before deciding to stay and fight. She doesn’t have a chance of outrunning this guy.

“Going for second?”

Mary freezes. All she can think of is John, laughing his ass off at her for falling down a hill when they were hiking, holding out his hand to a newly toddling Dean, the same phrase on his lips, the same grin, the same inflection. He called her Mom.

A man’s center of balance is in his chest. Mary uses this to her full advantage. It’s been ten long years since she’s been in a proper fight, but her body remembers better than she does. He’s not fighting back.

“Who are you?” she shouts in his face. “Where the hell is my family?”

“Mom—”

“Mary!”

“Mary, okay, okay. Please get off my chest.”

The sentence comes out in a wheeze because Mary’s knee is placed directly on his left lung. She eases off somewhat.

“My name is Dean Winchester. It’s May 31st, 2016.”

Mary does the math. If he’s telling the truth, he’s got the age right. But, that still can’t be right. Time travel doesn’t exist. Unless it does in 2016?

“Where are my kids?”

It’s Sammy’s sixth month today. They had a little pie—Dean insisted—and she remembers putting him to bed. But after that…

The so-called Dean takes a breath. “They’re with your husband. Tonight, they’re going to stay in a motel. Tomorrow, John is going to start researching the supernatural.”

The more he speaks, the more of her memory returns. She saw lights flickering, knew there some something wrong. She went upstairs and then—

“There was a fire.” Mary’s arms, poised to strike, drop to her sides. “Someone standing over Sammy’s crib.”

Her hands fly to her abdomen as she remembers pain like she’s never felt before. She expects to find a wound, but there’s just smooth skin under her nightgown.

“I’m dead,” she breathes. Then, “Are you?”

So-called Dean smiles. “Not this time.”

That should make her alarm bells go off, but it doesn’t. She take a closer look into his eyes, trying to find her son in them.

“Tell me something only you would know.”

She knows it’s a long shot—Dean is four, not old enough for that kind of a question—but she has to know.  
“You made an apple pie once when you were absolutely exhausted because Sam was crying all night—kid was always colicky—and you put cumin in instead of cinnamon. You didn’t tell Dad, so he ate it all without complaining because he didn’t want to insult your baking.”

That was a month ago.

“Dean?”

He smiles. With his face breaking open like that, Mary can almost see her four-year-old poking through. She gets off him and pulls him to his feet.

“You’ve got to be freezing.”

He tugs his jacket off and hands it over. Now that she isn’t focused on fighting for her life, she is cold. Even if it is May. Mary puts it on, and the sleeves fall past her hands. Before she can argue, he yanks his boots off and offers her them as well.

“Your feet are all scratched up, and I’m wearing socks,” he says reasonably. “Just put them on, Mom.”

The word feels like a knife to the gut. She hides any evidence of it from her face.

“We’re going to have to steal a car or something,” he says as she laces up.

She glances sideways at him. “You know how to do that?”

Granted, she does, too, but she never wanted the life where he would need to know how for him. Or Sam.

“Where’s your brother?”

Dean shrugs. “Probably back at the bunker.”

The what?

Dean was a nervous talker as a kid, but that’s doubly true now. He’s saying something about a woman named Amara and her brother, Chuck. Mary lets it wash over her, not bothering with trying to understand. It’s too much to take in all at once like this.

Every so often, he takes something out of his pocket and tries to do something with it. For the life of her, Mary can’t work out what he thinks is going to happen. He catches her looking.

“Cell phone.”

Mary blinks at it. It looks more like a USS Enterprise communicator than a phone, but she figures the future had come sooner than Kirk.

“I need to get ahold of Sam,” Dean says conversationally as they emerge on to the road. “He thinks I’m dead. Oh, hey, this is the road to the bunker!”

Mary, still stuck on the ‘thinks I’m dead’ bit of the conversation, doesn’t comment. They walk along the road for a while. Mary’s relieved that no cars pass by. She doesn’t think she can handle a flying Jetsons version right now.

“Wait until you see his face.”

Dean has the same excited bounce to this step that he’d had on the first day of school. John had stayed home from work to see him off. Mary smiles at the memory, but then it fades.

“Is your father—?”

He hasn’t mentioned John yet. Mary does some quick math. He’s in his sixties now. His side of the family all had weak hearts…  
Dean stops dead in his tracks. Mary’s heart twists.

“We were on Azazel’s trail,” he says softly. “The car got hit—I don’t think it was a coincidence, the driver was probably possessed—I…well, it wasn’t looking good.”

Mary’s eyes burn. She blinks furiously, trying to stop the tears from falling.

“It wasn’t the standard ten year deal. My life for his, take it or leave it. Life for me, Hell for him. This is all guesswork, honestly. He never got the chance to explain.”

Mary feels sick. “Humans can really go to Hell?”

Of course she’s heard about demon deals, but some part of her had always believed that there was no a human could actually…

“Yeah, but he’s not there anymore. When we opened the Devil’s Gate, he got out.”

Devil’s Gate? Some of her confusion must show on her face, because Dean waves it away.

“I’ll explain everything, but I need Sam and Cas and a drink for that.”

She wonders if this Cass person is Sam’s girlfriend, because in her experience, hunters don’t typically live together unless they are together.

“No way,” Mary says as they trudge up the last of the road.

John’s old—even by her standards—Chevy Impala sits on the driveway. It looks to be in the same condition, maybe even better than before. She’d hated that stupid car, but right now, it’s the best thing she’s ever seen in her life.

“Dad gave her to me when I was sixteen.”

Her. John had always called the car a her, too.

“Sam should have parked her in the garage,” Dean grouses.

He hurries over to her and sticks his hand in his own pocket. Pulling out the key, he smiles at her. It’s the closest they’ve been since she acknowledged that he’s her son.

She should hug him. She can’t.

Dean pushes the door open and gestures for her to follow. Mary does, noting that the soles of his socks are practically destroyed.

“He’s probably going to try to shoot us,” Dean informs her before calling into the bunker. “Sam? Cas?”

Nothing. Mary is the one to notice the bloodstain. “Uh, Dean?”

He swears under his breath, then turns to her wide-eyed, as if he thinks she’s going to tell him to put a dime in the swear jar. (She and John had one once, when they’d decided to go kid friendly. She’d filled it in less than a week.)

“I have heard big kid language before, you know.”

They both hurry down the steps. Mary thinks about how ridiculous they must look—her in a nightgown and a pair of too-big boots, him in his socks, both thundering down a flight of steps.

“Sam’s a bleeder,” Dean tells her, as if that’s supposed to make her feel better.

She’s never seen Sam bleed. Dean goes on rambling, talking about some hunt or another where a shallow cut on Sam’s head had bled like crazy. Mary tries not to think about her baby, bleeding on the floor, alone.

“Where’s this Cass?”

Dean points. “Banishing symbol.”

What? Mary follows his finger. She’s never seen that sigil before, but it makes one thing absolutely clear: Cass is not human.

“What is she?”

Does she need to give him the spiel about how you can’t trust anything that isn’t red blood human? How’d he survive thirty years of this?

Dean looks at her funny. “What?”

“Cass. What is she?”

“He’s a he. And an angel.” His brow furrows. “I’ve actually never asked him about the gender/vessel thing. He goes by he, at any rate.”

If she’d thought her head had hurt before, that’s nothing compared to her headache now.

“You always said angels were watching over me. Turns out it was just the one.” He scrubs his hand over his face as he turns back to the blood on the floor. “I’ve been up for forty-eight hours, and I’m sure you’ve had a long day. We’re gonna need some sleep if we’re going to get anything done.”

He gets her an old t-shirt of his and a pair of drawstring running shorts that are so large that she has to wrap the excess string around her waist like a belt. Then, he directs her to Sam’s bedroom. (“None of the other ones are set up, but don’t worry, he’s a neat freak.”) Dean looks as if he wants to kiss her goodnight, but loses his nerve at the last moment.

“Night, Mom.”

And then she’s alone.

Mary takes a few breaths, in through the nose and out through the mouth. It doesn’t help, but then, she hadn’t expected it to.

She’s not tired, so she rifles around in the bedside table. She finds a book on the occult, a how-to ASL guide, and a journal. She’d kept one herself, though she supposes it’s been burnt to a crisp.

Mary opens the journal on her lap. The spindly handwriting looks so much like John’s that she wants to cry. She doesn’t read anything, not wanting to disturb Sam’s privacy, but she flips through it, trying to imagine the six month old baby of yesterday becoming this. A man of letters, whatever that means.  
Suddenly, she feels completely suffocated by the lack of windows. Grabbing the nightgown off the bed, she makes her way into the hallway. It’s like a maze, but she made sure to memorize how to get back out. Even though the walls are thick, she makes sure to walk quietly. She doesn’t want to wake Dean up. She’s not sure why he’s been awake so long—not sure she wants to know—but he needs his sleep and she needs some time to herself.

Part of her wants to linger in the library, but the part that wants to take off wins out. She hurries past a table with a map on its surface and up the steps. She bursts out into the semidarkness, to the car.

She hates the thing, always has. They had two kids, they didn’t need a muscle car. But John always talked about how it was built to last. Apparently, it had been. Right now, it’s her best friend.

Mary pulls the driver’s side door open and collapses into the front seat. The nightgown in her lap and the car beneath her are the only familiar things in the world.  
That thought, more than any other, pushes her over the edge. Mary’s breath hitches. Despite the fact that there is no one around to hear her, she presses her knuckles to her mouth before any more sound can escape. She uses her other hand to mop at her eyes before the tears can really fall. She has to keep herself calm. This isn’t the time for feeling sorry for herself. They have to find Sam. Only after that can she worry about putting her life together and grieving.

“Hey.”

The passenger side opens and Dean drops into the seat beside her. Mary sniffs, trying to compose herself. It doesn’t work.

She goes for casual, as if there is such a thing when you’re faced with the adult version of the four-year-old you left behind. “Hey.”

“When Sam was upset as a kid, I usually took him for a drive.”

He hands over the keys. Mary takes them.

“Look. I know this is hard. I know it’s never going to be like it was. But I want us to be family.”

Mary takes a deep breath and sticks the keys in the ignition. “I can do that.”


End file.
